Because of the ever increasing requirements in data rates in communication systems, due for example to the Internet, the limits of using electrical communications between printed circuit boards (PCB) are being reached. It has become difficult to guarantee good signal integrity when transferring information at high frequencies (e.g. 25 Gb/s or higher) through electrical lines between two electrical components such as a printed circuit board.
To respond to this bandwidth demand, high-speed systems now use optical waveguide light to transfer light-carried information.
Light enables to improve the transfer of information between two points since light is less sensitive to interference phenomenon. However, electronic infrastructures (such as telecom cabinet) still implement printed circuit boards which still use electricity-carried information. So, it is necessary to implement on the printed circuit board devices, designed for converting light to/from electricity and for directing light into/from the optical waveguide.
To this end, it has been proposed on the market devices such as optical transceiver and active optical cable which are capable to convert optical signal into electrical signal and vice versa. These devices comprise an active component also known as optical engine, whose function is to manage electrical/optical signal conversion.
An optical engine comprises a substrate, having electrical paths, which supports optoelectronic components configured for converting optical signal into electrical signal and vice versa.
In use these optical engine are mounted to a printed circuit board of the electronic system. For instance the printed circuit board can be a mother or daughter card of a backplane assembly or a printed circuit board of an Active Optical Cable.
It is known from WO2010/010395 an optical engine made of a transparent substrate (e.g. glass, glass ceramic, photoformable glass).
An object of the present invention is to propose an improved printed circuit board assembly in which the optical engine package is easy, effective and less costly.